This blog is written by a journalist based in Mumbai who writes about cities, the environment, developmental issues, the media, women and many other subjects.The title 'ulti khopdi' is a Hindi phrase referring to someone who likes to look at things from the other side.

Sunday, December 07, 2014

Women can drive

The Hindu, Sunday Magazine, Dec 7, 2014

Sometimes a chance encounter makes you think that perhaps more things
are changing than seem evident. Some of that change is depressing; the
kind of change that is making cities like the one in which I live,
Mumbai, increasingly unlivable. But there are subterranean processes of
change, in people’s attitudes, in what they do, in how they overcome
even the worst circumstances that are not noticed.

One such chance encounter was with a taxi driver. The majority of taxi
drivers in Mumbai are men. This last week, 95 women managed to get the
license to drive taxis. Ninety-five out of some 50,000? That’s not even
worth a comment, you would think. But it is.

I chanced on Sindhu one morning when I was looking for a taxi. She does
not drive the traditional kaali peeli (Mumbai’s iconic black and yellow
taxi). She works with one of the city’s proliferating private taxi
services.

Sindhu was dressed in light blue jeans and a purple-checked shirt. She
wore gold studs in her ears and her nose. Her hair was pulled back in a
neat bun. If you did not notice her clothes, she would be your normal
Maharashtrian woman anywhere in Mumbai.

Sindhu is that, but I found over the course of a one-hour taxi ride,
that she is more than that. For one, she has chosen to drive as a
profession. Apart from the taxis that she has been driving for eight
years, she has also driven trucks that deliver bottled water to
different parts of the city. That brought back memories of Shubha
Mudgal’s wonderful song Man Ke Manjeere, and the video with Mita
Vashisht as a truck driver (www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O4-l84EKRc).

Why has she chosen to be a taxi driver, I ask her. Driving a taxi, she
says, is a good career for a woman. It is flexible. You can decide when
you want to drive, for how many hours. You can take a break if you want.
No one is forcing you to drive beyond your capacity. And best of all,
the money is good.

Like other women drivers in Mumbai, Sindhu first got a chance to drive a
taxi, a private, air-conditioned one, when two women entrepreneurs came
up with the idea of taxis driven by women. Their selling point was that
women passengers would feel more secure, particularly at night,
travelling in a taxi driven by a woman. Thus, began Mumbai’s taxi
services for women by women.

These services continue. But Sindhu decided that she could do better. So
she negotiated a loan to buy a car. And when private taxi services
began that were willing to let drivers use their own cars in return for a
fixed rate, she calculated that this would work out better. Before
this, she had to pay the owner of the cab a fixed rate every day.

What about her family, I ask? Her son, she says, has completed his
commerce degree and works in a call centre. He works nights. In the
morning, when he returns, Sindhu fixes him breakfast and then takes off.
The rest of the day, her husband and son, and the household chores, are
looked after by a woman she has hired. In the evening, between seven
and nine, Sindhu chooses to be home. The traffic is terrible at that
time, she says. But by 10.00 p.m., she is ready to hit the road again.
“People like to go out to parties, to dinner. They drink. They don’t
want to drive. So I get plenty of work at night,” she told me
cheerfully.

Sindhu lives in Cotton Green in central Mumbai, an area that is
undergoing a schizophrenic transformation. The old and the new coexist.
The new consists of gleaming high-rises, housing offices and luxury
apartments. The old are Mumbai’s traditional chawls, homes for the
working class who were once employed in the factories that populated
this area. Today the factories are gone; the workers remain. Some are
still unemployed. Others do any kind of work that’s available. And then
there are women like Sindhu who have found ways to negotiate this
changing environment.

So confident is Sindhu that she is now planning to take another loan to
buy a second car. She will then hire a driver, use it to earn additional
money to pay off the loan and still have a surplus.

Does she feel comfortable in trousers, I ask? Oh, yes, she says. I used
to wear saris, even cover my hair, she laughs. But ever since I became a
driver, and I was given a uniform, I decided this is best for work.

People are changing faster than you realise, she tells me. Could her
mother have ever imagined that she would be driving a taxi, I ask.
Never, she says. But it is a good career for a woman, she reiterates as
we roll into my destination.

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Journalist, columnist, writer based in Mumbai. Author of "Rediscovering Dharavi: Stories from Asia's largest slum" (Penguin, 2000). Worked with The Hindu, Times of India, Indian Express and Himmat Weekly.
Other books include "Whose News? The Media and Women's Issues" edited with Ammu Joseph (published by Sage 1994/2006), "Terror Counter-Terror: Women Speak Out" edited with Ammu Joesph (published by Kali for Women, 2003) and "Missing: Half the Story, Journalism as if Gender Matters" (published by Zubaan, 2010).
Regular columns in The Hindu, Sunday Magazine and on The Hoot (www.thehoot.org).